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Remember those days, not so long ago, when a perverse sort of suspended-reality sport could be found in guessing which mega-selling “rival” boy band — N Sync or the Backstreet Boys — would move the most million copies of its newest album during a single week? Or in rooting for, say, Eminem’s latest record to beat ’em both through the same, platinum-plated gate within the same impossibly tight time frame?

Well, lower your expectations accordingly for future wagers. As of June 29, 2014 — the midpoint of the year as marked by longtime music-industry bible Billboard — exactly one album had surpassed one million copies in sales in North America in the last six months: the soundtrack to Disney’s princess-themed, pre-Christmas animated smash Frozen.

Frozen has, granted, crossed the one-million mark rather decisively. Issued last November, the soundtrack — bolstered by the ubiquitous, Oscar-winning perennial-to-be “Let It Go” — has shifted more than 2.7 million units so far this year and some 3.03 million in total to date, putting it well ahead of the 702,000 copies moved since January by its nearest competitor, Beyoncé’s “surprise” mid-December release, Beyoncé.

And, as Billboard and other observers have noted, only three other albums have notched more than 500,000 in sales in 2014: country charmer Eric Church’s The Outsiders, New Zealand pop upstart Lorde’s Pure Heroine and U.K. rock anthemists Coldplay’s Ghost Stories.

“A year ago at this point,” notes Billboard, “there were 11.”

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My, how times change. The thought of even a diligent sleeper-hit with multi-generational appeal like the Frozen soundtrack matching the commercial success of, say, ‘N Sync’s No Strings Attached — which holds the Billboard record for first-week sales with 2.4 million in March of 2000 and went on to ship more than 11 million copies in the U.S. alone — is a pipe dream these days.

Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” — yet another hit hatched by a feature-length cartoon (Despicable Me 2) — was good for 5.6 million downloads this year, making it 2014’s top-selling single so far. Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse” and John Legend’s “All of Me,” both hovering around the four-million mark, are the only singles to come close.

All in all, decent but not great for the mainstream music industry. As USA Today notes: “Album sales, sliding for years, are down 15 per cent compared to the same period last year. Those dips have been partially offset by booms in digital sales, but downloads have also drooped, slipping 13 per cent since last year’s midpoint.” If it’s all gonna even out in the end, there’s still more of a crush to come at the top of the curve.

The upside to these developments, if there is one, is that traffic through music-streaming services such as YouTube, Spotify, Pandora and Rdio keeps growing. According to Nielsen SoundScan, American usage of such portals — many of which allow listeners to access vast libraries of songs for free — is up a whopping 42 per cent over where it was a year ago during the first half of 2014. Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse” alone has been clicked upon 188 million times this year.

So, yes, people are still availing themselves of music on a grand scale. But, as the New York Times points out, “a crucial question is whether the increasing income from streaming services — which pay fractions of pennies in royalties each time a song is listened to — will offset the drop in sales.” Nielsen’s formula equates the revenue generated by 1,500 streams to that of a single download or CD sale, which doesn’t exactly position streaming as the great industry saviour it’s often made out to be.

It’s a point of much public contention, too, whether or not the limited profits generated by streaming services are actually trickling down to the artists who make the music in the first place in a meaningful way. Last year, for instance, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and longtime producer/compadre Nigel Godrich made a vocal show of pulling Atoms for Peace’s Amok and Yorke’s solo album The Eraser from Spotify, with Godrich declaring on Twitter that “new artists get paid f--- all with this model. It’s an equation that just doesn’t work.”

Former Galaxie 500 frontman Damon Krukowski put some math behind these assertions in a revelatory piece for Pitchfork in November 2012. Galaxie 500’s “Tugboat,” he noted, was played 7,800 times on Pandora in one quarter, “for which its three songwriters were paid a collective total of 21 cents, or seven cents each. Spotify pays better: For the 5,960 times ‘Tugboat’ was played there, Galaxie 500’s songwriters went collectively into triple digits: $1.05 (35 cents each).

“To put this into perspective: Since we own our own recordings, by my calculation it would take songwriting royalties for roughly 312,000 plays on Pandora to earn us the profit of one — one — LP sale. (On Spotify, one LP is equivalent to 47,680 plays.)”

These aren’t isolated complaints. A broad cross-section of musicians from aged superstars Pink Floyd to au courant chart-toppers the Black Keys to cult-beloved singer/songwriter Aimee Mann — who last year launched a lawsuit against MediaNet, a streaming provider with connections to major labels EMI and BMG and Internet behemoth AOL, over what she claimed was unlicensed use of her songs online — has lately made its distaste for the streaming model known.

The upshot? No one’s buying records anymore, but everyone’s still listening to them as long as they don’t have to pay. Meanwhile, the companies that have traditionally made their money from selling records are still finding ways to squeeze what little cash they can from not selling records while, as has historically been the case, hanging the creators of those records out to dry. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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